There is an emerging consumer market for certain devices that are used as companion products to smartphone devices. Their popularity can be traced, in part, to the variety of features they provide to a user. For example, one such device is a wearable device, such as a ring worn on the user's finger, a necklace, a watch, eyeglasses, a bracelet, or a wristband that is worn around a user's wrist. Typically, such wearable devices may provide different features, such as a logging function that monitors the user's motion and resting activities, and then sends a report on the detected motion and activities to the user's smartphone for storage in memory. Another feature allows the wearable devices to be used as a personal token to automatically gain access to a smartphone that has been locked. Particularly, a wearable device worn by the user may communicate with the user's smartphone, thereby permitting the user to bypass the manual entry of a predetermined unlock sequence associated with the smartphone.
Such features are already present on commercial products/devices. However, a common issue associated with these devices is that they either need a physical interface (e.g. a 3.5 mm audio plug, an Universal Serial Bus (USB), etc.) or some sort of wireless “local connectivity” (e.g., Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi, Near Field Communication (NFC), etc.), in order to transmit data between the devices. Such methods for communicating, however, can be cumbersome. Additionally, these types of communication may be a limiting factor that could constrain new features waiting to be implemented on such devices.
Body-coupled communication (BCC) is a communication in which the human body serves as a transmission medium. For example, a communication signal may travel on, proximate to, or in the human body. According to one known approach, this may be accomplished by creating a surface charge on the human body that causes an electric current and formation and re-orientation of electric dipoles of human tissues. A transmitter and a receiver are used to transmit a body-coupled signal and receive the body-coupled signal. There are a number of advantages related to body-coupled communication compared to other forms of communication, such as power usage, security, resource utilization, etc.